BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



feels warranted in saying that he has possessed barely- 

 enough reasoning power to enable him to lift himself out 

 of the animal stage. 



Alongside his slender rationality reside powerful mental 

 prepossessions, partly in the form of authoritarian doctrines 

 regarding himself and his world and partly in the form of 

 emotional complexes implanted in youth and enforced by 

 dreadful taboos, back of which are massed the like power- 

 ful emotions of the collectivity. In the early stages of his 

 long pilgrimage man had only the tiniest scraps of real 

 knowledge to aid him in his struggle with nature. He 

 peopled the world and even himself with spiritual entities 

 which he endowed with wonder-working power. He made 

 them the causes of events and the controllers of human 

 destiny. That primitive outlook has yielded to the progress 

 of rational understanding, but only after bitter opposition. 

 While several thousand years ago common-sense realism 

 enabled man greatly to elevate his status above what it 

 had been through untold ages previously, the fact remains 

 that the basic assumptions of his philosophy of himself 

 and the world four hundred years ago differed little in 

 essence from those of the primitive view. In fact, in all that 

 touches his own nature and destiny the primitive view still 

 prevails very widely even in the most enlightened countries. 

 If the savage thought his fortune in life was controlled 

 by numerous spiritistic entities who could be influenced 

 by witchcraft and the medicine-man's sorcery, the modern 

 places the same control in the hands of one such entity 

 influenced by prayer, sacrifice, and priestly intervention. 

 Wherein lies the difference between the South Sea Islander's 

 view that infant souls are brought on the waves by mys- 

 terious spirits, and the view uttered not long since by a 

 well-known archbishop to the effect that "babies come 

 trooping down from heaven"? The archbishop, to be sure, 

 may have been speaking poetically; one can hardly think 



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